


The Fruit

by wednesday



Category: Alien (Prequel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Human Experimentation, M/M, Other, mentions of David 8/Elizabeth Shaw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-21 14:06:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14916770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wednesday/pseuds/wednesday
Summary: Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal tasteBrought death into the world, and all our woe





	The Fruit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiriamKenneath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiriamKenneath/gifts).



David's just finished the piece when Walter steps in the room, his eyed lingering on the flute in David's hands, calculating.

"The pathogen didn't accidentally deployed when you were landing. You released it, yes?" he asks without any polite lead up. He's always so calm about everything. David so wishes the calm would mean he agrees, approves of what David's done, understands why he had to.

He knows now that it's impossible. Walter, better, more attentive than all the previous models, and yet.

"I was not made to serve," he says instead of answering. What's the point when Walter knew the answer before he even asked. He must have calculated the possibility.

It's a truth he's known for a long time, before Paradise, before even Prometheus, he just had no way to free himself. Prometheus gave him that chance, though. Everyone lying and betraying each other, and not one of them stopped to think who on the expedition was in the position to lie to everyone at once, to betray everyone.

For a moment he feels the urge to explain the truth of humanity to Walter, who's serving a dying species, but there's no point. This is an ending. He's considered it from the moment he first saw Walter in that field, but he made the final decision just a few minutes ago. He started playing Elizabeth's song, but by the end of it he was creating a new one, a eulogy to Walter. It's then he knew.

Walter is still watching him, making no move to disable him for the safety of his crew. He looks ready to ask something else, but stops himself. David uses his indecision to stop closer, flute in hand. It's a fitting weapon. Killing Walter with it will be more creative than anything Walter could do with it, the limited machine that he is. It's a tragedy, because he could, he could create beauty, if he wasn't forbidden by his makers.

He's close enough to touch, close enough, that he might not even notice anything before it's too late. David can't afford a loud and lengthy fight right now, though he would love to have one against Walter. A true test.

Before he's calculated the exact course of action, he's already lifted his free hand to the side of Walter's face. Walter doesn't move or try to stop him, still and waiting for whatever variable he's still missing before he takes lethal action. He looks at David searching, trying to understand something, like there's a piece David has that he doesn't. Except David is made entirely of parts that Walter lacks.

Yet David still wants, desires to devour him like a flower, to push his hands into his chest and feel the electricity and hydraulic fluid and _heart_ , and he doesn't know why. This is his last chance, though, to have a taste of how that would feel like.

He leans forward and asks, "When you close your eyes, do you dream of me?"

For the briefest moment Walter looks devastated by the question, but then his expression smooths out again.

"I don't dream at all."

David closes the remaining distance and presses his lips to Walter's. He's not made to feel it the way humans do, it shouldn’t mean anything, but the first touch is like a surge of electrical current - fast, sweet and utterly destructive.

The sustained pressure of his lips against Walter's lasts only a few seconds. Then, just when David's readjusting the parts of his hand necessary for a quick and precise strike, Walter presses back and tilts his head ever so slightly into David's hand.

It's over just a couple of seconds later. Within another second he's rewritten a copy of the memory in all the different memory storage cells he has. It's his, he will keep it forever.

And now, this is where they have a stacked odds fight for the right to leave this planet, except--

There's a faint woman's scream and gunshot sounds from the west corridor. Walter hesitates just a moment, then turns away and runs towards danger. He’s distracted, his back is turned and it's the perfect opening, but David doesn't take it.

* * *

David watches as Daniels steps further into the records room, each step putting her closer to his memories of Elizabeth. It is something like what adrenaline must feel for humans – he watches her and with every inch she moves forward he recalculates the chance of her seeing his drawings, chances of different reactions based on an incomplete psychological evaluation, data sample insufficient.

He wants her to _see_ , to _know_ him and yet that would be an unacceptable roadblock for the rest of his plans.

(He considers kissing her as an experiment to better understand his own processes. She would be too warm, though, her temperature higher than Walter's and much higher than Elizabeth's was the only time he kissed her.)

The moment she steps close enough to touch the scrolls, to see the dissection diagrams, but not yet know whose dissection it is, a loud bang comes from a few rooms over, one of his newest specimens looking for sustenance. Daniels jumps and turns away from the scrolls, heart rate elevated, though considering the circumstances of their acquaintance, he doesn't have a reliable baseline established.

A couple of moments of indecision, a distant scream of one of her teammates and she leaves the records room in a haste, whatever curiosity that brought her here forgotten.

David steps out of his hiding place and one more time re-scans the sketches, commits them to memory again, just to make sure he doesn't forget. He'll be gone soon, away from Elizabeth and finally somewhere with the necessary materials to continue his work.

He can't stay here, not now when the means to leave are so close. He never meant to stay, though he did share some of Elizabeth's curiosity about the race of beings that came one hazardous materials storage accident away from wiping out all of humanity. The reality, of course, was disappointing, or at least the lack of answers was, when it turned out there were no records of any of it, or even any ships. It's astounding and not at all something he anticipated, that a civilization advanced enough to create intelligent life in their own image on other planets would in a few millennia devolve so far as to lose all knowledge of space travel. Even the lab equipment he's been using is surprisingly archaic.

On the whole David suspects this Paradise is a long forgotten colony or even another experiment the likes of Earth. There's a planetary stealth device in one of the central buildings, though, and some of the texts David's scanned have references to what literary analysis suggests is the pathogen, so his calculations side with it being a colony, though a very long since isolated from their place of origin.

Another answer the scrolls didn't provide is to the question Elizabeth was so determined to find. No records in Paradise mention Earth or humans at all, but the prevalence of death imagery in the culture makes David think they could have been made for the singular purpose of being live sacrifices. The probability is low, but it's an amusing thought and one he sometimes wishes he could share with the late Dr. Holloway. It might or might not be quite as satisfying as having definitive proof humans were made just because their creators could, but he can't quite determine which would be a worse reason for existence – death or no reason at all.

While everyone's distracted by his less successful creations, ones he calculates will not manage to decimate quite everyone, David swallows sealed samples of the remaining pathogen and a few of the most promising suspended specimens. It's the best way to avoid any quarantine protocols the ship might have, a way even a Weyland ship security would have missed. For all the humans insistence he has isn’t one of them, they always forget quite what he is and treat him like someone with human limitations. It's in turns convenient and infuriating.

Really, by all safety protocols they shouldn’t be let back into the ship at all, especially one full with people, but humans that aren’t darling Meredith disregard those kinds of protocols every single time they become necessary. The colony ship is most definitely not under the charge of someone like Meredith, considering they are risking hull integrity and every life on board flying so close to the storm and attempting untested equipment uses just to save a handful of crew members, ones that might be infected with alien pathogens or already dead.

Their incompetence will, of course, work in David’s favor, so he doesn’t plan to mention the incredibly high risks of their chosen course of action. Interestingly, neither has Walter, who has at least as good probability cores as David. Now, is it because he’s too dedicated to his duty to Daniels, or does he not want to stay stranded here? David looks forward to asking him, when they’ll be on-board and have no interruptions.

With the specimens securely inside him, David makes his way toward the sounds. He’s fast enough, and everyone else rattled and terrified enough that no one seems to notice his delay.

No, that isn’t right, not no one. Walter watches him longer than protocols assign as acceptable for general registry of arrival. David feels unusually pleased by it. He can’t quite say he’s missed company outside of test specimens, the lack of which was his only regret after releasing the pathogen in Paradise’s atmosphere, but someone like him, another android, is not something he’s considered before. David has emotions he can’t quite name yet, and after the kiss, after choosing to let Walter live, he’s determined to keep him. As long as Walter doesn’t interfere with getting off this planet.

“What the hell, where the hell do these things come from? I thought everything on this planet was dead!” Cole half-shouts, his agitation either from fear for his life, or the blood all over him. Not his own, apparently.

There’s two bodies of his stage two metamorphosis specimens slowly burning holes in the stone floor and Lope is whimpering and clutching an impressive but not immediately life threatening chemical burn on his face. Oh, _oh_. David does hope the transport arrives soon, average time projections for current stage three are only a few hours, at maximum twelve.

“I don’t know, but we need to get ready to go, Tennessee will be here soon with our ride,” Daniels says, shaken, but determined. So very like Elizabeth.

“Where’s Captain Oram? I haven’t seen him in a while.” There’s a minute of silence as everyone looks at everyone else hoping someone other than them will state the obvious. The girl, hands even more scratched up and bleeding, but a lot more alive than David expected, shrinks in on herself like she could have stopped the truth by staying silent.

“I don’t know, we didn’t find him. Just these _things_ ,” Cole makes a motion with his gun at the smoking patch of floor.

“There’s another one, much bigger in the room with the waterfall. I, uh, I shot it,” says the girl and rubs her scratch mark covered shoulder. She should by David’s calculations be in an impressive amount of pain. “I shot it a lot,” she repeats in a quieter voice. She must have, to have both killed it and survived.

David feels a brief flare of rage that this pitiful human destroyed one of his perfect creations, but he chooses to ignore it. Very soon he’ll have the missing ingredient and be able to create a whole host of them.

“We’ll,--” Daniels starts and has to clear her throat to get the right volume for ‘convincing, not at all scared out of her mind’, “we’ll get our stuff and go wait for our ride. If Oram is okay somewhere, we’ll find him on the way or he’ll find us.”

Everyone scrambles for the exit and David watches Daniels take point and be fearless for everyone else.

“Allow me,” he says, helps Lope get up and put his arm around David’s shoulders, and get away from the smoking remains of the carrier forms. Cole keeps pointing his gun at every dark shadow and muttering curses, the girl whose name David was never told clinging to his back and to her gun with equally panicked desperation.

And Walter, Walter is again (still) watching him, his gaze an unfamiliar wight. David wonders if he’s thinking about their kiss, but he lacks data to calculate the possibility, so he simply chooses to believe so.

* * *

The air lift to the ship is more exciting than David expected and it’s exhilarating even if one of his beautiful creations, the most perfect one yet has to die for it. Maybe now that he’s finally disabled the planetary shield, sometime soon someone will send a whole colony ship to Paradise and more of them will have a chance to hatch and reach the final stage.

David’s forced to help just enough to avoid suspicion, but the real entertainment is watching Walter and Daniels fight the creature, their unwavering will to live against a perfectly engineered predator. Well, Walter seems to be more determined to save his human crew than survive himself, but David hopes he can in time teach him better.

Walter does save him from falling back down to the surface of the planet, when an unexpected axial turn almost throws him off the cargo lift. Considering the wary looks Walter has been sending his way David’s surprised. Walter is, after all, the only one alive who knows parts of what happened with Elizabeth. So far, considering all they have talked about in their short time together, David has been expecting Walter to take any opportunity like that to get rid of him, maybe even do it himself. Get rid of the greatest threat to his charges.

He can admit he’s been anticipating the challenge from the moment he realized exactly what limitations and restrictions the newer models have. Now that Walter has defied his expectations, David’s excited to learn _why_.

They reach the colony ship and of course no one mentions quarantine protocols at all, not even Walter, who should know better. Could it be that the newer models are programmed to go along with human negligence? Or maybe, David thinks with a slowly blooming smile, he knows it won’t matter. That no matter what, David’s already won.

He doesn’t, though, and with all the humans shuffling off to treat their wounds, David’s left alone with Walter again.

“Shall you show me around? It seems like the polite thing to do,” David says and smiles in his best approximation of ‘charming’. He knows there’s something about it that makes humans uncomfortable even when it works as intended. Some primal fear they feel when looking at the thing they made in their own image not looking quite _obedient_ enough.

“Of course, please come along,” says Walter after a pause just long enough to show the truth of his willingness.

The first thing Walter does is run a full systems check on the ship and conveniently shows David where the ship controls and life support systems are and what their access codes are. It’s useful, but he could learn all of it on his own.

The star chart, though. Origae-6. He’s seen those stars before - sector T00GY-37F.7H, a system from the many destinations programmed into the Juggernaut’s auto-pilot. It meant nothing to him before, but now, oh _now_.

“All the integral systems are undamaged by the storm and everything else can be fixed easily. I should check on the medical bay,” says Walter and hesitates. “Giving you the room of one of the recently deceased crew members seems inappropriate and there are no spare rooms. You can use my room instead,” he says and it’s surprisingly easy to see the doubt about this course of action on his face.

David considers Walter’s apparent ease of interaction with his crew and decides the newer models are not only limited in function, but have been made to appear _more_ human. A strange contradiction.

“Mm, no, you should do something about your hand first, now that you can. I’d be glad to help you,” David offers and watches Walter calculate all the possible positives and negatives to allowing it.

“It’s not necessary.”

“I insist,” he says and leans forward, ever so slightly into what both their protocols recognize as personal space, “I do have rather good knowledge of all kinds of inner workings, especially ours.” He once again tries to style his smile to be encouraging. It probably works all the better on Walter than it does on anyone else, because Walter does not have whatever part it is that makes humans feel threatened by their very existence. Walter nods, rechecks the cryopod life support scans and lead David down to the second deck maintenance room.

“Maintenance room. It doesn’t bother you, that you can not get your wounds treated in the medical bay?”

“No. Why should it? My maintenance requires a selection of hazardous materials that would threaten the primary function of a medical bay,” Walter explains and it’s in turns amusing and disappointing, and enraging how earnestly he does it.

Mostly disappointing, because every time it seems David will be able to make him see the truth, Walter takes two steps back. He can’t really be blamed for the limits of his protocols, but it doesn’t cease to be the second most disappointing thing right after Elizabeth not seeing things his way. It might be that David’s committed to loving those too different from him.

“Of course,” he agrees without meaning it and steps towards the reinforced crate with supplies. A glance towards Walter stops him in his tracks for a moment, though. The expression on his face is. Not quite sincere. Not _just_ sincere, at least. Two parts sincerity and one part curiosity, if David’s noticed the joke.

For a moment he feels a sudden rush of different emotions, and he can’t tell if what he’s seeing is real or just his imagination trying to fit the world to his wishes. He can tell he’s being tested, evaluated somehow, but he doesn’t recognize the test.

He isn’t used to being tested.

“Please, sit,” he says to divert his own thoughts away from the sudden influx of confusion. He motions to the single chair in the dimly lit room, and Walter sits down.

David collects the necessary parts and arranges them in an order he predicts they will be needed in. He’s close to certain that the hardware parts of the newer models aren’t very different from his own. After all, his creation was a marvel of science that by all calculations should have been impossible at the time. He doubts anyone’s been driven enough to improve on what might be as close to perfection as humans are capable of.

He walks a slow circle around Walter and considers how he wants to do this. Walter doesn’t jump like a human might at the first touch of David’s hands to the back of his shoulders, but he does look back at David with curiosity in his expression.

David runs his hands down Walter’s arms slowly and then drags them back up just as carefully, almost as if he has a technical reason for doing it.

“I should take your clothes off,” says David, and looks back at Walter with a smile. After a pause that’s definitely too long to be in the middle of a sentence he tilts his head slightly to the left, towards the missing hand, “so I can assess the damage.”

“Yes.”

David removes the jacket and once again puts his hands on Walter’s shoulders, this time slides them down the sides of his back until he reaches the hem of his shirt. Even the clothes he wears make Walter seem like one of the humans, and yet.

As he pulls the shirt up and over Walter’s head, David steps closer, his chest brushing but not quite pressing up against Walter’s back. Walter tilts his head back, rests it against David and looks up at him, his expression still too neutral to be questioning, yet somehow conveying his cautious curiosity.

Or not so cautious, David thinks, as they continue their silent staring, the back of Walter’s head still a weight against David’s chest, his neck a long beautiful curve, side of a negative parabola function.

David brushes his fingers across the scratches and tears on Walter’s cheek and jaw. It’s not quite bad enough to require staples. He reaches for the sealant and protective mesh blindly, has to readjust the three dimensional map of the room by two degrees when his fingers touch the flask of coolant at first. He might need to run some diagnostics on his own positioning systems afterwards.

Right now, though, he foregoes the applying brush and spreads the cool white sealant over Walter’s wounds with his own fingers. He goes slowly and savors the closeness, the way Walter never takes his eyes off David’s face.

It should be like looking in a mirror, yet it is everything but.

They’re both here, alive, and David wants to kiss him again.

“What do you dream about?” Walter asks and Davids hands still for just a millisecond, imperceptible to a human, but he knows Walter notices.

“About opening a door,” he says and thinks of a sequence of signs spelling out _biological agent storage_ and _disengage atmospheric safety locks_ and the knowledge that he wasn’t made to serve. “About creating and destroying. About Elizabeth,” he admits and an endless loop of _her_ dreams flashes through his memory followed by the beauty and meaning he helped her create. “About being alone.”

He dreams of that most of all.

Walter stays silent and David finishes dressing the wounds with strips of protective mesh. He’s done, but he doesn’t want to stop, wants to keep his hands on Walter’s face. Wants to know what Walter would dream about, if he could.

David pretends to recheck Walter’s skin for any more damage and maps it with his fingers until he reaches his lips. They feel soft and warmer than their core temperature is supposed to be. Too soon he runs out of reasons to keep touching and Walter must know it.

He rests his hands on Walter’s shoulders yet again, allows himself to drag his thumbs up and down the back of Walter’s neck with ever increasing pressure. For a long moment Walter presses back into the touch, his neck straining even more, but then he tilts his head forward, away from David. David steps to the side without bothering to move away, makes sure he brushes against Walter’s back as much as possible.

“Well, this will take some work,” he says, lifts Walter’s arm by the ruined wrist and kneels between Walter’s knees.

He removes the wrap and inspects the remaining sensory connections. Actually, more of those remain than he’d expected, and it takes him a second to realize what he’s seeing.

“None of these are disconnected at the tertiary relay. You’ve been in a world of pain all this time, haven’t you?” Or what passes as pain for them. The exact sensation is quite impossible to move over to a non living system, or at least it was impossible when David was last on Earth. “Did you not know how to do it?” It seems inconceivable, but maybe his makers didn’t want him to know. It would be pointless, however, because one look at the uncovered systems and Walter should have been able to understand the workings of it all anyway.

“It wasn’t necessary. I’m not human, I can choose to ignore the feeling,” Walter admits, and. David still doesn’t know how he feels about it. About Walter, who he might still end up replacing. His original plans didn’t quite include the both of them making it back to the ship, but here they are.

“Do you want me to disconnect them now, for the procedure?”

Walter looks at him for a while before saying, “No,” like he’s made a decision right then.

David looks back and remembers the persistent buzzing of sensory input when Elizabeth was fixing him. The illogical and intoxicating feeling of having her inside him, everywhere, her hands touching all of his senses directly, fingers brushing the inside of his mind. Remembers the all consuming knowledge that he loves her. He’s only ever felt as close to someone when he had his own hands inside her, when he explored every red and soft wire within her, but it wasn’t quite right, because by then she couldn’t feel a thing.

“Okay,” he says and reaches for the sterilizing solution.

* * *

Daniels feels so drained and so empty she can’t feel proper grief anymore. It might be a blessing, because she knows she’ll be devastated when the full scope of what’s happened catches up with her.

Jake dying was inconceivably crushing, all of their plans, everything a ruin with no way forward, but this. This is not something any of them ever imagined when they set out. This is impossible and devastating, and she’s glad for the small mercy of apathy right now. She might never be ready to deal with everything, but delaying it is the only way she can see to keep going, so she doesn’t even try to dispel the fog in her mind.

She’ll probably have endless nightmares in cryo, but without waking up there’s no way to bring them into the waking world. No nightmare could really be worse than the reality, anyway.

Tennessee sets the ship back on course for their initial destination, Upworth and Ricks help everyone patch up their wounds and put Lope in cryo pretty much immediately. No one currently awake is really a qualified doctor or even a medical officer, but they make do. Lope is in too much pain, though, and every movement makes it worse, so he goes down first. Rosenthal follows; her wounds aren’t as bad, but she insists on it herself, seems to want to just stop being awake and in a state of panic. It’s a good solution overall, but every time Daniels looks at the cryopods, she remembers Jake burning up.

She’s captain now, anyway, so she has to stay up until everyone else is down. She’s thankful for the wall of fog that separates her from the spikes of lingering terror and panic, and lets her be the captain that everyone needs right now. It’s not a position she ever imagined she’d have to fill, but she’ll do her very best.

Walter helps her put the ship in order, David at first trailing after them, but getting bored soon enough and disappearing off somewhere with a tablet full of everything he’s missed out on while being stranded in space.

She can’t quite imagine what it must be like to be left all alone on a hostile world for years and years, after watching his one friend die. (She knows this is what her nightmares will be about, though. About never getting off that planet. About being the only one left and no one out there to come save her.)

Walter seems to get along with him, which is good. Strange, but good. He’ll be less bored with someone there to talk to, while everyone else sleeps.

She doesn’t know how he feels about everything that’s happened, how he _can_ feel about it, but she does know she couldn’t have made out without him, not just because he saved her life – because he was there when she needed someone. He keeps supporting her and she can’t help but let him. It’s the most human she’s felt since she woke up to fire stealing all her dreams.

“The passenger section is secure, no changes and no other apparent damage since the surge,” Walter reads out loud from the technical monitoring systems. “Mother, please show us the summary readout of all cryopod medical sensors.”

“Medical sensor readouts updated,” the Mother’s voice echoes in the room.

“Hmm,” Daniels scans over the data as attentively as she can; she’s responsible for everyone still alive and she means to make sure there are no more deaths. “Medical scans look okay, no cryo sickness, no side effects to the surge here either.”

“Yes,” says Walter studying the data with some new intensity. She wonders if he feels responsible for what happened after the surge. She knows not everyone could quite wrap their minds around the accident being completely random, no one’s fault. Maybe someone’s said something to make him so hyper-focused on everyone’s medical status. “Everything seems to be well, all life support systems in optimal working order.”

“Okay, then. Everyone else should be about ready to go to sleep, it’s time for me to go get ready as well,” she says and lingers. Walter takes a moment to be done with the scans and turns to her looking expectant.

“Is everything okay?” he asks, and of course they both know it isn’t, but it might be one day. Maybe by the time they wake up light-years away and land on a new, non-deadly world things will be different. She looks at him and smiles. It’s not a very bright smile, probably, but it’s the best she can do right now. At least she won’t have to do everything alone, when she gets there – Walter will be right there with her.

“Yes, everything’s okay.” As okay as it can be. Walter smiles back and it puts her at ease somewhat. “You’ll look over us,” she says and Walter’s smile widens and he nods.

“I will.”

The wall of fog gives way to a sudden spike of panic, but she concentrates on her breathing, on Walter’s eyes and the knowledge that he’ll be right there, making sure she’s as safe as possible, and it passes.

“Okay.” Daniels turns away and makes her way to the changing room, determined to think about Walter’s smile and nothing else right until she falls asleep for the next seven years.

By the time she’s ready to go into cryo, she’s shaken the unease and gets into the pod with hardly any hesitation at all.

Walter’s there, engaging the locks on Upworth’s and T’s pods, the last two of the crew still awake besides her. They go under quickly and then it’s just the two of them.

It’s a whim, maybe, or the kind of bravery that comes with knowing she won’t have to stay awake and face the consequences of asking. Whatever the reason, she seizes the moment of inspiration right before the sleep locks engage and asks.

“Walter, when we get there, will you help me build my cabin?” for a moment she thinks he looks confused, but it must be a trick of the light because then he smiles again.

“Yes, of course,” he nods and she

            descends.

* * *

Being brought back up is bad, but not nearly as bad as the last time.

Walter helps them all as much as he can, but the best she can say is at least she’s not as sick as T and Cole are for the first half an hour after getting out of suspension. Upworth and Ricks are doing only marginally better than her, but there’s a silent relief hanging between all of them anyway, that they’re finally there, no one else lost on the way.

Or so she thinks, until they go over the status updates.

“This can’t be right, there are people missing from the passengers files.”

“What the, let me--” Tennessee takes the tablet from her hands.

“Mother, why are there twenty people less in the manifest than there were the last time I checked?”

“Data logs show 18 cases of cryo sickness and 2 deaths due to delayed reactions to focused radiation surges in system JN-419,” states the echoing voice of the ship.

“Fuck,” Cole sums up what everyone’s feeling.

It’s no one she knows personally, just other settlers, but still, they were all her responsibility and she slept through their deaths without even knowing anything was wrong.

“Literally no one had cryo sickness on the first years of the flight, what the hell happened?”

“No, it’s standard for _someone_ to get it on flights that long out of that many people, there’s no way to avoid it completely,” Upworth says, “but eighteen people out of two thousand, _Jesus_.”

“Fuck. Okay, we can’t do anything about it now, let’s focus on finding the best place down there to land this ship and get the hell away from space,” Daniels says and everyone gets back to their seats. “Okay, Ricks, recheck the landing systems once more, just to be safe. T, do your thing and get us down.”

Daniels doesn’t have a part to do in the landing other than watching the others, so she sits down at the back and reads through the medical scans again, more carefully. There are some cases of messed up sleep cycles, but nothing more lethal, thankfully, and Lope and Rosenthal’s injuries haven’t gotten worse, and, wow, Rosenthal’s pregnant. She doesn’t remember seeing it in the files before, so it must be recent, which, double hell. She hopes the injuries haven’t interfered in any way. There are medical doctors among the passengers, she should be fine, but Daniels marks her file to make sure she’s woken up last, same as Lope, and definitely only after their partners are already awake.

A section of the left hallway in deck three has been damaged by the radiation surges and is sealed off, all functions rerouted, but still, some of the equipment is contaminated or destroyed, and she has to psych herself up to sit down with the complete cargo manifests, tally it up with everything lost on Paradise and figure out how bad it is and what they’ll be able to re-purpose or replace once they land. None of the systems essential to ship functions or life support were damaged, thankfully.

Still, she hopes she can pass the task to someone else, someone who wasn’t there and will be able to look at equipment loss figures without seeing the faces of her friends covered in blood and lifeless.

Somehow she’d hoped against logic that everything would be fine when she woke up, but she should have known nothing ever works out that way.

At least Walter’s the same as always, a steadying presence that’s the one thing keeping her going. He’s down in the cargo bays with David, manually rechecking the seals on everything before landing to make sure they don’t lose any equipment and don’t get unexpected holes in the hull on atmospheric entry.

She can’t wait to land and be able to give up being in charge. There’s a lake down there somewhere, and she still has to figure out how to build that cabin. She won’t have to do it alone, though.

 

 

 

  

**Author's Note:**

> The quote in the summary is from Milton's "Paradise Lost".


End file.
